On Being Contrarian
Anyone who knows me knows that I am often susceptible to the charge of being excessively disdainful or dismissive of most things contemporary, at least in the soul-defining realms of ideas, art, and politics. I freely admit to being guilty of such an excess on occasion, or even on most occasions. Having granted this, however, I must aver that I come by my immoderate and early-onset curmudgeonliness honestly. For I somehow grasped relatively early in life, even before I could have articulated the principle, that it is better to err on the side of distancing oneself from one’s time — that is, of looking at one’s easy proximities with suspicion and doubt — than on the side of accommodating oneself to it, due to the fact that accommodation of the ubiquitous and familiar (the immediately comfortable) is the default emotional propensity of every human being by necessity, and also, for that very reason, the single greatest threat to all our hopes of spiritual growth.
All real learning, as Aristotle observes with profound simplicity, proceeds from what is most knowable to us to what is most knowable in itself. That is to say, the ultimate or highest objects of understanding — the sources of wisdom, or “knowledge of the whole” — are the least accessible to our awareness at the outset, due to our inevitable starting point as beings entrenched in materiality and hence dependent for our practical survival on the evidence of the senses and the variances of physical pleasure and pain. Therefore, the process of seeking a knowledge beyond the limits of proximate personal awareness entails gradually transcending the narrowness of mere experiential “truth” in favor of the comprehensiveness of purely intellectual, or properly universal, truths which are ever more remote from the particularities of our spatio-temporal existence (i.e., from the here and now in which we happen to find ourselves), but which provide the ultimate grounds — and thereby the only genuine understanding — of that spatio-temporal experience which constitutes “what is most knowable to us.” (That is, as Aristotle’s own formulation implies, what is most knowable to us is not really knowable at all, since the only thing that counts as knowledge in the fullest sense is the understanding of ultimate causes, which is precisely what the pragmatic knowledge of “what works” in the here and now, or the functional explanation of appearances, can never provide.)
In my instinctive dubiousness or even open disdain for the art and thought of my contemporaries, my soul is expressing a natural reflex — natural in the sense of being true to that element of human nature which only slowly becomes present to us as we mature in thought and feeling. Specifically, my soul is recoiling before the danger of all those traps of familiarity that conspire to confine the intellect to the present, the already-seen, “the way we think these days,” and so on, because I know that what I need most of all, which is to say what I most lack and find hardest to come by, is a window to what is least familiar or most distant from my comfortable here and now. I crave the books and ideas that challenge me not with abstract complexity or dizzying cleverness, but with alternative ways of defining and answering life’s great questions. I run to the thinkers and artists who reveal a world where I may become immersed in conversations that are almost impossible today, addressing topics that are no longer seen as viable or open, and encouraging speculations so vast and so unconcerned with practical usefulness, popular perceptions, or “scientific certainty” that merely allowing oneself to venture into these speculations without sophistical reservations is an act of defiance and a declaration of freedom against the constraints of the body — both one’s own material body and one’s temporal body politic — which is to say against the diminution and enslavement entailed in overidentifying with one’s own time and place, with the ruling assumptions of the day, and with the spiritual quicksand of those practical social expectations in which daily life and “self-preservation” invariably mire us.
